She put the phone down and sat for a while in the quiet of her new apartment, in the thin autumn light coming through the window, in the particular quality of a morning that is both an ending and a beginning. She thought about the person she had been for the last two years—quieter, more careful, perpetually adjusting herself to fit a space that had never been built for her. She thought about the person she had been before that—the one who carried a cheap ballpoint pen and stayed up until three in the morning rewriting business projections because she could see what was wrong with them and knew how to fix it.
She had not lost that person. She had just put her down for a while, the way you put down something heavy when the carrying gets hard, meaning to pick it up again when you have the strength.
She had the strength now.
She picked up her own pen—a cheap ballpoint, same as always—and opened a clean notebook to the first page, and she began to write.
She wrote notes for the first three hours of that day. Pages of them: structural ideas for the division, names of people she wanted to talk to, gaps she had identified in the technology investment sector where she thought a patient and discerning approach could find genuine value, questions she would need to answer before she could begin to answer anyone else’s. Her handwriting was fast and messy when she was thinking hard—it always had been—and the page filled quickly with her slanted, urgent script, and she did not stop until her tea had gone cold and the light had moved across the floor and she looked up and realized three hours had passed without her noticing, which was the truest sign she knew that she was thinking about the right thing.
She made fresh tea. She stood at the window and looked at the city and felt, for the first time in a long time, that the ground was solid under her feet.
The first Monday at Reed Financial, she arrived twenty minutes early.